Billions of rounds of hollow points, black helicopters- what does it all mean?

In a puzzling, unexplained development, the Obama administration has been buying and storing vast amounts of ammunition in recent months, with the Department of Homeland Security just placing another order for an additional 21.6 million rounds.

Several other agencies of the federal government also began buying large quantities of bullets last year. The Social Security Administration, for instance, not normally considered on the frontlines of anything but dealing with seniors, explained that its purchase of millions of rounds was for special agents’ required quarterly weapons qualifications. They must be pretty poor shots.

But DHS has been silent about its need for numerous orders of bullets in the multiple millions. Indeed, Examiner writer Ryan Keller points out Janet Napolitano’s agency illegally redacted information from some ammunition solicitation forms following media inquiries.

This administration did something illegal? Shocking.

DHS could shoot us all- with hollow points:

According to one estimate, just since last spring DHS has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion bullets, mainly .40 caliber and 9mm. That’s sufficient firepower to shoot every American about five times. Including illegal immigrants.

To provide some perspective, experts estimate that at the peak of the Iraq war American troops were firing around 5.5 million rounds per month. At that rate, DHS is armed now for a 24-year Iraq war.

Question is, against whom?

Did Obama hint at why in 2008?

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Some members of the U.S. military were busy in Miami Thursday night as they conducted exercises in Downtown Miami.

CBS4 captured video of Black Hawk helicopters flying over the city as part of a joint military training exercise.

Thursday night’s training took place near the Stephen P. Clark Center in Miami and a nearby Metrorail station where troops could be seen rappelling from the military choppers onto the Metrorail station platform.

HOUSTON (KTRK) — The sight of Army helicopters and the sound of gunfire created a lot of concern Monday afternoon in one Houston neighborhood.

We received a lot of phones calls, Tweets and Facebook posts from worried neighbors, wondering what was going on.

SkyEye 13 HD was over the south side where at first look, it appeared there was a massive SWAT scene happening.

With military helicopters flying above her southeast Houston neighborhood, Frances Jerrals didn’t know what to think.

“When you see this, you think the worst. When you hear this, you think the worst,” Jerrals said.

And so, she passed along her concern.

“She told me ‘don’t come home it sounds like we’re in a war zone. Guns, shooting, helicopters flying around the house,'” Isaac Robertson Jr. said.

The U.S. Army along with other agencies took over the old Carnegie Vanguard High School near Scott and Airport. There were armed men in fatigues, plenty of weapons and what many thought were real live rounds

“I felt like I was in a warzone.” Jerrals said. “It was nonstop. I was terrified.”

Gunfire? In a residential neighborhood? Yes, blanks, but without warning?

We had Janet Napolitano warning us of domestic terrorists such as US military veterans, pro-life groups and those opposing illegal immigration.

Mike German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and a former FBI agent, said his organization was concerned about law enforcement agencies’ focus on radicalization, regardless of the specific ideology.

“Certainly, the right-wing report is focused far too much on rhetoric and things people say and things people think rather than on criminal activity and the people involved in criminal activity,” he said. “There is plenty of crime out there for federal, state and local law enforcement to worry about. They don’t need to invent threats that they have no factual basis for supporting.”

Right wing report. That would let Bill Ayers and the Weathermen slide as they were left wingers. And it would also omit these lovely people as Napolitano only concerns herself with right wing terrorists and apparently not those from the left:

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.

People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.

I don’t believe I have ever heard Napolitano speak of left wing terrorists.

And then this claim (something I have been reluctant to touch) by Jim Garrow appeared in the Examiner:

“I have just been informed by a former senior military leader that Obama is using a new “litmus test” in determining who will stay and who must go in his military leaders. Get ready to explode folks. “The new litmus test of leadership in the military is if they will fire on US citizens or not.” Those who will not are being removed.

Alone it sounds conspiratorial but when joined by the other events, well, we need some answers.

Why do does DHS need all those hollow points?

Why is there only right wing terrorism?

Exactly what is going on? Maybe it’s all entirely innocent. And maybe you can keep your health care plan and your doctor too.

About DrJohn

DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.

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132 Responses to “Billions of rounds of hollow points, black helicopters- what does it all mean?”

jaspercounty1

ilovebeeswarzone

jaspercounty1
you read my mind,
I though about that also,
or maybe they want to go in the suply busyness and sell it with a profit
and kill all the private busyness, that you only buy from the government is their way of doing ,
killing the private busyness, that’s what they have been doing all along.

jaspercounty1

Brian Winkler

@Rocky Butte Your Liberal leadership is doing its best to paint veterans as potential terrorists because some do have PTSD and struggle to reintegrate after leaving the service.Don’t you think it a stretch to tar all vets with the same brush.The mass killers seem to be drawn from the Left/Progressive side but the DHS sees nothing there to merit a conclusion like that for them.Just veterans, conservatives and Christians who stand against a usurpatory, statist government. I’m sure you have no problem with your POTUS arming al Qaeda proxies and sending 2000+ firearms south to the most savage criminals on earth. I would gather that you have no problem with your boy Obama and Hillary both going MIA while the Benghazi mission was sacked and Americans betrayed and left to die.I guess we should all roll over and let frauds,poseurs and liars take the 2nd Amendment rights of law abiding citizens away for the” common” good. Does the hypocrisy of calling for gun control after American children are killed yet raising no protest over the 5x more Pashtun children killed as collateral damage from drone strikes in the Paki tribal areas even register with you Progs.

Brian Winkler

@Bees, Ansar al Sharia claimed the attack was reprisal for the killing of a Libyan al Qaeda commander in a drone strike but there are questions still unanswered as to what was really afoot in Benghazi and what Stevens was actually doing there.There are claims that it was a revenge strike for covert American raids against al Qaeda in north and central Africa. It may have been nothing more than a 9/11 strike against a lightly defended US instillation as the opportunity presented itself or the action of a splinter group seeking to take out a ranking American and help themselves to weapons cached at the mission.

ilovebeeswarzone

Brian Winkler
hi,
yes BUT THE FACT THAT THE MOB BURN OBAMA POSTER FACE, AND THOSE CARRYING THE SIGNS
OF THE ONE WHO WHERE KILLED BY DRONES, THEY TARGET HIM PERSONALY,
told me more that it was the source of their anger,
and you are right with all the rest included to it,
a real package deal, and they burn the FLAG ALSO AND RAISE THE ALQAEDA FLAG,
bye

Greg

Hollow point bullets punch a cleaner hole in paper targets than standard bullets. They make it much easier to precisely mark your hits, particularly after multiple rounds have been fired at the same target. Ball ammo will quickly tear a paper target up, especially with tightly placed shots.

Hollow point rounds also have greater stopping power with relatively low velocity handguns.

Both uses considered, this probably makes hollow point ammunition the most versatile single choice for federal law enforcement purposes.

Another consideration is a possible reduction in the likelihood of collateral damage: Hollow points quickly impart more of their energy to the target owing to their expansion or deformation. Consequently, they’re less likely to pass through a soft target and strike something behind it, less likely to pass through light walls still carrying most of their energy, and less likely to ricochet off hard surfaces still carrying most of their lethal energy.

Greg

Maybe someone will find this story amusing:

One of the weapons I trained with before I was sent off to Vietnam was a Daisy BB gun. BB guns were used in what the Army called “quick kill” training. The point was to become adept at wheeling and firing accurately on an unexpected, close proximity target, without any conventional aiming—to learn how to point and fire effectively in a single motion, without even looking down the barrel of your rifle. You were to learn to reflexively point the gun toward the place in space where your eyes converged on the target, as if the gun’s line of fire was the line of sight of a third eye.

The targets were these little aluminum disks, which started out around three inches in diameter. You worked on those as they popped into the air until you were getting consistent hits. They were then downsized over a couple of steps, until you could consistently hit disks about the size of a fifty-cent piece that flipped up 5 or 6 feet away. It was amazing how quickly the skill could be acquired.

It would be interesting to know how many BB guns the Army ordered over they years they conducted the training. Probably there were some raised eyebrows among people who didn’t know about the quick kill program.

Budvarakbar

Greg

Source? Personal history. I had the training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, during the summer of 1969. It was hot as hell, and the entire place seemed to be made out of red clay, much of which I picked up while crawling through it.

I suppose there might be something online. I hadn’t thought about it in over 40 years.

Jim Griffin

Wordsmith

editor

@Jim Griffin: That’s a myth. The GC had nothing to do with hollow point/”dumdum” rounds.

Fact: Expanding bullets have never been outlawed by international law in any war or conflict that the U.S. has participated in. The issue of expanding bullets was briefly addressed at the International Peace Conference held at The Hague in the Netherlands in both 1889 and 1907. However, the U.S. never ratified the twelve-paragraph document (Declaration IV, 3) that dealt with expanding bullets. In fact, fewer than 25 countries actually signed that declaration, and that declaration has never been enforced since its ratification on July 29, 1899.

Concerning “dumdums,” in 1897 the British Army discovered that round-nosed rifle bullets simply were not proving effective against their foe, the very committed Indian warriors. As a result, British researchers retreated to the laboratory, so to speak, and went to work on a new rifle bullet, one with an exposed lead core. That lab was located at—you guessed it—Dumdum, India! The new rifle bullet, later termed the “dumdum,” had an exposed lead core surrounded by a thinner metal jacket that allowed for expansion. It proved very effective. Later versions were modified with filed-down points, flat noses, and cores cut with longitudinal lines.

The mass killers seem to be drawn from the Left/Progressive side but the DHS sees nothing there to merit a conclusion like that for them.

Actually, I don’t think the anti-war left have any problem with slapping mass killers with the “damaged vet” label, and chalk it up to ptsd. They would love to portray killers like him as another victim of war. Case in point. He did not see combat while in the military:

PTSD may not explain the shooting spree of Dorner, who allegedly killed three people in less than a week. Dorner military records don’t indicate any treatment or diagnosis for PTSD, and he cleared the psychological evaluations needed to gain entry into the Los Angeles Police Department, according to military records and court documents.

Dorner’s military record shows that he served in the Middle East, but not as a combat soldier. Dorner’s military duty did include underwater work, and in his 11,000-word “manifesto” Dorner claims he suffered traumatic head injuries.

If that is the case, his symptoms would look a lot like PTSD, Reyes said Friday.

“The impulsiveness, the zoned-out reaction to high-stress situations, they are all symptoms of PTSD and TBI, traumatic brain injury,” Reyes said.

You may recently have seen some in the Internet rumor mill feverishly repeating the obvious truth above, in an effort to stir up fear about recent acquisitions of ammunition by the Department of Homeland Security and a number of smaller agencies. The mildest writers have questioned why seemingly mundane agencies would need ammunition at all; more incendiary authors suggest that these government agencies are preparing for a war with the American people.

Much of the concern stems from a lack of understanding of the law enforcement functions carried about by officers in small federal agencies.

~~~

Another recent rumor questioned a request for 46,000 rounds of.40-caliber ammo by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA inadvertently fueled that speculation through a clerical error that suggested the ammunition was destined for the National Weather Service. NOAA later clarified that the ammunition was actually for the little known Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement, which enforces laws against illegal fishing and marine life importation. The ammunition is for 63 personnel, amounting to about 730 rounds per officer.

The most widespread of the recent rumors involves a Department of Homeland Security contract for a maximum of 450 million rounds of .40-caliber jacketed hollow-points, to be supplied over the next five years.

After receiving numerous questions from his constituents regarding the contract, pro-Second Amendment U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) and his staff set out in search of the truth. In a press release, Rep. Westmoreland’s office explains:

If you take the number of agencies that will be using this ammunition – CBP, Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, the DHS police force, and all the guards that protect the various buildings these agencies are housed in, and spread that out over 5 years, you start to see that 450 million rounds really isn’t that large of an order. Especially considering it is used for training purposes like firing range and live fire exercises, on-the-job use (though that is very limited), and to shore up their supplies. In fact, there are 65,000 – 70,000 law enforcement personnel at DHS who would be covered under this … ammunition contract. If DHS were to purchase all 450 million rounds over 5 years, then that would equate to only about 1,384 rounds of ammo per year per law enforcement [officer] … assuming the lower estimate of only 65,000 law enforcement personnel at DHS. Considering those agents go through training exercises several times per year, that is not a lot of ammunition.

Perhaps most strangely, some have cited the purchase of hollow-point ammunition as evidence of the federal government’s evil motives. Hollow-points are the defensive ammunition of choice for federal, state and local law enforcement officers across the country, just as they are for private citizens. These attacks are eerily similar to statements made by gun prohibitionists, who spent the much of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s complaining about “dum dum” bullets. (In fact, the Violence Policy Center’s website still exhibits a publication lamenting that federal ammunition law “has no effect on today’s generation of high-tech hollow-point ammunition.”) The attacks also ignore the fact that federal agents, unlike average taxpayers on more limited budgets, normally train and qualify with their duty ammunition.

As most gun owners will agree, skepticism of government is healthy. But today, there are more than enough actual threats to the Second Amendment to keep gun owners busy.

Richard Wheeler

Skookum

Word, it’s true; at least your explanations are true, despite the lack of excitement and romanticism such logical explanations herald and the despair felt by conspiracists across the country, but what about the black choppers?

Can you explain whether aluminum foil makes a decent hat or whether you actually need tin foil. I don’t want people heading off in the wrong direction. Ultimately, I assume it is about the radio signals and penetration. Is the bone in some skulls thick enough to preclude the protection of a foil hat?

ilovebeeswarzone

WORDSMITH
WHY NOW?
ARE THEY AFRAID TO RUN OUT OF AMUNITIONS?
and they want to get it before the merchants who made many orders ,
get their stocks in their store,
they know the demand is still high,
does it scare them?

Petercat

@Greg: #65
I remember reading about this when I was young, I believe it was in Popular Science magazine, in an article about the limits of hand-eye coordination.
Some soldiers became so good that they could consistently hit another BB in the air with a BB gun!

retire05

If you take the number of agencies that will be using this ammunition – CBP, Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, the DHS police force, and all the guards that protect the various buildings these agencies are housed in

I understand arming CBP, the Secret Service, DHS police forces and the guards of federal buildings but come on……FEMA needs to be armed? For handing out blankets, water, food and medical supplies? For what? TSA needs to be armed when all airports provide security from local police departments? And if we are arming the Border Patrol to the point where they need all this additional ammunition, why was BP Agent Brian Terry armed with bean-bag shot (confirmed by the Tucson BP local)?

And do we include in all those that are being armed Obama’s newly minted Blue Shirt FEMA responders (who we never saw during any of the Hurricane Sandy coverage)? Why is the Social Security Administration buying ammunition? Are they afraid of radical seniors who visit their offices to find out about SS benefits?

“The Social Security Administration, for instance, not normally considered on the frontlines of anything but dealing with seniors, explained that its purchase of millions of rounds was for special agents’ required quarterly weapons qualificiations.

According to one estimate, just since last spring, the DHS has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion bullets, mainly .40 caliber and 9 mm. That’s sufficient firepower to shoot every American about five times, including illegal immigrants.”

Seems to me this administration is providing arms and ammunition to a lot of federal workers that have no use for those arms, all the while Obama, Nancy Pelosi and her ilk, are trying to make gun ownership even more difficult for the average, law abiding citizens. And while I understand why private citizens are stockpiling ammunition due to the fear that the government will shut down their ability to purchase it in the future, why would the government itself be stockpiling if those ammunition manufacturers are not going to be put out of business?

Yeah, our government needs to provide ammunition to those who have a requirement to carry a weapon during the course of the job, like FBI, Secret Service, Border Patrol, U.S. Marshall’s Service, but come on, arming TSA and FEMA? For what?

I find it curious (and much more than slightly amusing) that the Interwebz stink-stirrer who scribbled this post is suddenly conspicuously quiet in the face of multiple link-rich and well sourced rebuttals.

In light of these revelations, one is left with only two possible conclusions. The author either a) lacked the basic knowledge requisite to the topic or b) possessed sufficient knowledge of the topic and chose to exclude all controverting evidence, concluding that readers wouldn’t notice as they gobbled yet another serving of lemon-colored pablum from the feed trough.